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Saturday, August 08, 2015

“I Write This As A Warning To The World”

Doctors Fall As They WorkPoison gas fear: All wear masks

Express Staff Reporter Peter Burchett was the first Allied staff reporter to enter the atom bomb city. He travelled 400 miles from Tokyo alone and unarmed carrying rations for seven meals – food is almost unobtainable in Japan - a black umbrella, and a typewriter. Here is his story from Hiroshima.

1945

In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly – people who were uninjured by the cataclysm – from an unknown something which I can only describe as atomic plague.

Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world. In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.

When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around and for 25, perhaps 30, square miles you can hardly see a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man made devastation.

I picked my way to a shack [sic] used as a temporary police headquarters in the middle of the vanished city. Looking south from there I could see about three miles of reddish rubble. That is all the atomic bomb left of dozens of blocks of city streets, of buildings, homes, factories and human beings.

STILL THEY FALL

There is just nothing standing except about 20 factory chimneys – chimneys with no factories. I looked west. A group of half a dozen gutted buildings. And then again nothing.

The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city. With the local manager of Domei, a leading Japanese news agency, he drove me through, or perhaps I should say over, the city. And he took me to hospitals where the victims of the bomb are still being treated.

In these hospitals I found people who, when the bomb fell, suffered absolutely no injuries, but now are dying from the uncanny after-effects.

For no apparent reason their health began to fail. They lost appetite. Their hair fell out. Bluish spots appeared on their bodies. And the bleeding began from the ears, nose and mouth.

At first the doctors told me they thought these were the symptoms of general debility. They gave their patients Vitamin A injections. The results were horrible. The flesh started rotting away from the hole caused by the injection of the needle.

And in every case the victim died.

That is one of the after-effects of the first atomic bomb man ever dropped and I do not want to see any more examples of it. But in walking through the month-old rubble I found others.

THE SULPHUR SMELL

My nose detected a peculiar odour unlike anything I have ever smelled before. It is something like sulphur, but not quite. I could smell it when I passed a fire that was still smouldering, or at a spot where they were still recovering bodies from the wreckage. But I could also smell it where everything was still deserted.

They believe it is given off by the poisonous gas still issuing from the earth soaked with radioactivity released by the split uranium atom.

And so the people of Hiroshima today are walking through the forlorn desolation of their once proud city with gauze masks over their mouths and noses. It probably does not help them physically. But it helps them mentally.

From the moment that this devastation was loosed upon Hiroshima the people who survived have hated the white man. It is a hate the intensity of which is almost as frightening as the bomb itself.

‘ALL CLEAR’ WENT

The counted dead number 53,000. Another 30,000 are missing, which means “certainly dead”. In the day I have stayed in Hiroshima – and this is nearly a month after the bombing – 100 people have died from its effects.

They were some of the 13,000 seriously injured by the explosion. They have been dying at the rate of 100 a day. And they will probably all die. Another 40,000 were slightly injured.

These casualties might not have been as high except for a tragic mistake. The authorities thought this was just another routine Super-Fort raid. The plane flew over the target and dropped the parachute which carried the bomb to its explosion point.

The American plane passed out of sight. The all-clear was sounded and the people of Hiroshima came out from their shelters. Almost a minute later the bomb reached the 2,000 foot altitude at which it was timed to explode – at the moment when nearly everyone in Hiroshima was in the streets.

Hundreds upon hundreds of the dead were so badly burned in the terrific heat generated by the bomb that it was not even possible to tell whether they were men or women, old or young.

Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes – except that there were no ashes.

If you could see what is left of Hiroshima you would think that London had not been touched by bombs.

HEAP OF RUBBLE

The Imperial Palace, once an imposing building, is a heap of rubble three feet high, and there is one piece of wall. Roof, floors and everything else is dust.

Hiroshima has one intact building – the Bank of Japan. This in a city which at the start of the war had a population of 310,000.

Almost every Japanese scientist has visited Hiroshima in the past three weeks to try to find a way of relieving the people’s suffering. Now they themselves have become sufferers.

For the first fortnight after the bomb dropped they found they could not stay long in the fallen city. They had dizzy spells and headaches. Then minor insect bites developed into great swellings which would not heal. Their health steadily deteriorated.

Then they found another extraordinary effect of the new terror from the skies.

Many people had suffered only a slight cut from a falling splinter of brick or steel. They should have recovered quickly. But they did not. They developed an acute sickness. Their gums began to bleed. And then they vomited blood. And finally they died.

All these phenomena, they told me, were due to the radio-activity released by the atomic bomb’s explosion of the uranium atom.

WATER POISONED

They found that the water had been poisoned by chemical reaction. Even today every drop of water consumed in Hiroshima comes from other cities. The people of Hiroshima are still afraid.

The scientists told me they have noted a great difference between the effect of the bombs in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki.

Hiroshima is in perfectly flat delta country. Nagasaki is hilly. When the bomb dropped on Hiroshima the weather was bad, and a big rainstorm developed soon afterwards.

And so they believe that the uranium radiation was driven into the earth and that, because so many are still falling sick and dying, it is still the cause of this man-made plague.

At Nagasaki, on the other hand, the weather was perfect, and scientists believe that this allowed the radio-activity to dissipate into the atmosphere more rapidly. In addition, the force of the bomb’s explosion was, to a large extent, expended into the sea, where only fish were killed.

To support this theory, the scientists point out to the fact that, in Nagasaki, death came swiftly, suddenly, and that there have been no after-effects such as those that Hiroshima is still suffering.

The Russian-Harvard Privatization Back Story

Through the late summer and fall of 1991, as the Soviet state fell apart, Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists participated in meetings at a dacha outside Moscow where young, pro-Yeltsin reformers planned Russia’s economic and political future. Sachs teamed up with Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s first architect of economic reform, to promote a plan of “shock therapy” to swiftly eliminate most of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned life for Soviet citizens for decades. Shock therapy produced more shock–not least, hyperinflation that hit 2,500 percent–than therapy. One result was the evaporation of much potential investment capital: the substantial savings of Russians. By November 1992, Gaidar was under attack for his failed policies and was soon pushed aside. When Gaidar came under seige, Sachs wrote a memo to one of Gaidar’s principal opponents, Ruslan Khasbulatov, Speaker of the Supreme Soviet, then the Russian parliament, offering advice and to help arrange Western aid and contacts in the U.S. Congress.

Enter Anatoly Chubais, a smooth, 42-year-old English-speaking would-be capitalist who became Yeltsin’s economic czar. Chubais, committed to “radical reform,” vowed to construct a market economy and sweep away the vestiges of Communism. The U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.), without experience in the former Soviet Union, was readily persuaded to hand over the responsibility for reshaping the Russian economy to H.I.I.D., which was founded in 1974 to assist countries with social and economic reform.

Friday, August 07, 2015

Dem Leaders Show Allegiance to Israel First

President Barack Obama’s push to get congressional approval for the Iran nuclear deal has run into opposition, even after envoys from the UK, Germany and Russia told US lawmakers that rejecting the agreement would be a “nightmare.”

In a statement posted to his website Thursday evening, New York Senator Chuck Schumer said he would endorse a Republican-drafted disapproval resolution “not because I believe war is a viable or desirable option, nor to challenge the path of diplomacy,” but because he believed “Iran will not change.” Schumer is supposed to take over the leadership of the Senate Democrats later this year.

The Obama administration seemed less put off by Schumer’s announcement, calling it “disappointing but not surprising.” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday that 12 members of US Congress – seven Representatives and five Senators – publicly expressed support of the agreement in recent days, showing that Obama had made a persuasive case in his speech at American University on Wednesday.

Even with Schumer’s defection, the Democrats should have the 34 votes required to uphold a presidential veto, even if they no longer have the 41 votes required to outright defeat the disapproval resolution in the Senate.

A number of Jewish lawmakers have come out in opposition to the deal, however, including Reps. Ted Deutch (Florida), Nita Lowey (New York), and Eliot Engel (New York), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

On Friday, California Democrat Brad Sherman also announced his opposition. “This Agreement is the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It contains the good and the bad in the first year, and gets ugly in the years thereafter," Sherman said.

Europeans: Rejection would be ‘a nightmare’

Earlier this
week, envoys from Germany, UK, France, Russia and China met behind
closed doors with Senate Democrats to address their concerns over the
Iran deal.

“The prospect of the rejection of a deal makes us nervous,” Philipp Ackermann, the acting German ambassador to the US, said Thursday. “It would be a nightmare for every European country if this is rejected.”

Chances of getting a better deal from Iran were “far-fetched,”
UK Ambassador Peter Westmacott maintained, agreeing with Russian
Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that international sanctions against Tehran
would fall apart if Congress blocked the deal.

The lawmakers’
rejection of the agreement would only serve to isolate the US,
independent political analyst Dan Glazebrook told RT. The deal itself
represented a recognition of fading US power.

Washington’s “declining
influence and agency in world affairs is forcing it to negotiate, when
once it could just issue orders or drop bombs,” Glazebrook said.

Protesting at U.S. X-Band Radar Base

Global Network members holding banners outside the Pentagon's new X-Band radar base near the Ukawa village in the northern part of Kyoto prefecture in Japan. American soldiers stood on the other side of
the fence armed with machine guns, walkie-talkies, and cameras.Some arrogantly laughed at us.

We presented the beleaguered village committee with our
annual Peace in Space Award and promised them they were not alone in this
fight.Already they’ve seen the
disruption of their local culture by the American GI’s assigned to the base.
The fishing and farming village will surely become a prime target as Obama
‘pivots’ 60% of US military forces into the region. Despite Pentagon
reassurances the Ukawa villagers are deeply worried about the health effects
from the radar just as are the residents on Cape Cod, Massachusetts and
citizens in other locations around the world where the US has deployed similar
missile defense (MD) radars.No
legitimate health studies have ever been made public that measure the true
human impacts of electromagnetic radiation waves.

Hiroshima to Taiwan

We've arrived in Taiwan to visit my son - just in time for a typhoon which is going to hit the island. We had a heck of a time getting thru immigration at the airport but eventually made it after some ridiculous delays. It's great to see Julian in his neighborhood here in Taipei which he now considers his new home.

Yesterday we participated in the closing peace rally in Hiroshima that was attended by 5,500 people. I was asked to speak along with a representative from the Chinese peace and disarmament organization and a German Minister representing the World Council of Churches (who mentioned Ukraine which was good to hear since many people are ignoring that important hotspot).

Once it turned dark last night we went down to the river in Hiroshima where many people threw themselves to escape the enormous burning pain 70 years ago after the US unleashed the first atomic bomb on that unsuspecting city. Floating lanterns were placed in the river in memory of those who perished in the US bombing. The crowd along the river was huge and it was quite moving to see all of those who assembled to say Never Again!

Afterwards Mary Beth and I went to dinner with Global Network board convener Dave Webb (who also chairs the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the UK). We had a great time with Dave on our last night in Japan - he went on to Nagasaki this morning for more international meetings and ceremonies.

The entire experience of being in Japan during the past week was really wonderful. It is heartening to see so many people organizing against war and the possible destruction of all human kind. I find hope in those wonderful and determined peace workers. God bless them all.

Thursday, August 06, 2015

U.S. Imposes Its Will on the World

The US has a long history of arming oppressive regimes. Usually the
practice is sold strategically as a way to spread freedom in the media
and by the government. Recently, the US Embassy in Cairo, Egypt,
actually bragged about arming the regime under Sisi in Egypt, a regime
that Human Rights Watch and other groups have identified the regime in
Egypt as one growing in brutality.

Wednesday, August 05, 2015

The ISIS $$$$ Game

The resurgence of a 'new enemy' in the Middle East has led to a boom in
the military contractor industry, especially for companies such as
Lockheed Martin and AM General, which have been making profits selling
weapons and vehicles.

There is growing evidence that the US, NATO, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan and Turkey created ISIS in order to take down Syria and to further destabilize the region thus keeping the US public afraid and the weapons industry in the money game.

Recently ISIS fighters have been sent to Ukraine to join the Kiev puppet regime's forces in their daily attacks on the innocent citizens along the eastern border near Russia. I'm certain the plan is to spill this chaos into Russia in hopes of overthrowing the Putin administration in Moscow.

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Hobo GI

Q: What is this?

A forward-looking street-based performance about
the legacy of war and the need for nonviolent conflict resolutions. It
is Lone Wolf Tribe's ongoing series about transforming militarism and
aggression into compassion and kindness.

Q: Why a clown in a soldier’s uniform?

A:
He is a hybrid character inspired by famous tramp clowns, Otto
Griebling and Emmett Kelly, as well as World War II cartoonist Bill
Mauldin, who realistically portrayed the punishing reality of soldiers
fighting on the battlefields of Europe.

The sad clown is symbolic
of the immense sorrow from war’s destructiveness - for both soldiers
and civilians. The painful evidence shows in the alarming rates of
veteran homelessness, PTSD & suicides.

Q: Why doesn’t he talk?

A:
Honoring the clown’s pantomime tradition while acknowledging a
soldier’s directive to not question orders, the Hobo Grunt works
entirely in silence, embodying the adage: “actions speak louder than
words”.

Q: Is he a veteran?

A: No, but his father was a
Marine who committed suicide when the performer was 12 years old. He is
also an associate member of Veterans for Peace, believing in a
non-violent mission to end all wars.

Q: What is the point?

A: To deepen our empathy for all living beings, giving peace and healing a larger space to grow in our lives and in the world.

Monday, August 03, 2015

Golden Rule is Back on the Seas

A recently restored, historic peace boat arrived in San Diego, California Sunday to
take part in the Veterans for Peace 30th Annual National Convention.

The
Golden Rule arrived at Shelter Island after traveling down the coast
from Eureka. The boat is most famously known for being used as a tool to
stop international nuclear weapons testing in 1958. Now, crew members
hope the boat can have the same effect again.

Over the next 10 years, the Golden Rule is scheduled to sail around the United States, passing along its message of peace.

Global Network Delegation to Okinawa

Just prior to our Global Network conference in Kyoto, Japan a delegation of our folks went to Okinawa for a couple days to show solidarity with the protests (going on for more than 4,000 days) against the US construction of a new Marine base. The base at Henoko will include two aircraft runways that extend out into pristine Oura Bay that is home to precious coral and endangered sea mammals.

There are multiple US military bases on Okinawa and the people (from the grassroots all the way up to town mayors and the governor of the island) are in a state of revolt demanding the bases be closed. At Kadena Air Force Base the US has deployed 'missile defense' systems aimed at China.

GN board convener Dave Webb (England) reports that over 300 blockaded the main gate at Camp Schwab (bottom photo). Nobody tried to get through the
gate but soon after the international group left the protest the police moved in
to break up the blockade.

It was reported today that the Japanese have declared a one month delay on US base construction at Henoko. Several commentators have remarked that Japan's right-wing Prime Minister Abe "is cornered" as his poll ratings have dropped due to his pushing the unpopular move to get rid of the nation's peaceful Article 9 in their constitution that forbids offensive war preparations. Washington has long been pushing Tokyo to dump Article 9 but in the past month major protests have been held across Japan opposing Abe's attempt to follow US orders to get rid of the restrictions on allowing the military to join with the US in boxing in China.

One must wonder if this move by Abe was due to the approaching attention that will come during global events to remember the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Let's hope that the Japanese peace movement can sustain the pressure on Abe and that international support can build for the campaign to Save Article 9!

Annual Coordinator Report – 2015

One might call 2014 the ‘year of Russia’. In a recent Chicago speech by
George Friedman, founder and CEO of the private intelligence corporation
STRATFOR, he declared that the US wants “regime change” in Moscow. The project
is well underway as Russia becomes encircled by US-NATO bases along its border
and Pentagon deployments of land-based ‘missile defense’ (MD) systems in Poland,
Romania, and Turkey. US Sea-based MD systems are actively cruising in the
Mediterranean, Black, and Baltic seas and plans are underway to post them in the
Barents and Bering Seas.

Similarly, an expanding and US controlled NATO is moving to encircle China
with its new ‘alliance partners’ in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and
Japan. Land-based MD systems have been deployed in Japan, Okinawa, South Korea,
Taiwan, Guam and sea-based MD interceptor systems are being docked throughout
the Asia-Pacific region.

Washington’s message to Russia and China? “We have put a loaded gun to
your head. Forget your efforts to create a multi-polar world through the new
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) economic development
bank. The west is in charge of the global economic system and we are backing up
our control of the world economy with space-directed Full Spectrum Dominance.”

This is the moment that we are now in as we hold the Global Network’s (GN)
23rd annual conference.

Things really began to unravel when, in 2002, the US withdrew from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia that restricted deployment of MD
systems. Since that time the Pentagon and the Missile Defense Agency have
expanded research, development, and testing of these systems and have begun the
provocative and dangerous deployments of MD near Russia and China. Those two
nations have repeatedly warned the US-NATO that MD deployments would blow apart
serious negotiations for nuclear weapons reductions. In fact all sides are now
moving toward new generations of nuclear weapons.

It is much to my surprise, and disappointment, that some parts of the
global peace movement has yet to understand or recognize the dangers of US-NATO
expansion and MD deployments. Maybe it fears the recycled red-baiting (what I
call being ‘Putinized’) that waits anyone who speaks out against the western
encirclement of Russia. Whatever the reason the peace movement is in a weak
position today, in part because of its reluctance in dealing with the aggression
of US-NATO on behalf of corporate globalization. As a result the possibility of
WW III is now greater than ever according to Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus
of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton
University.

During this past year I’ve been spending several hours each day learning
more about the civil war in Ukraine. After studying many accounts confirming
the US directed the coup d’état in Kiev, I am convinced this was intended to
create chaos and civil war along the Russian border in order to further plans
for destabilization of the Moscow government. Professor Cohen is now warning us
to follow the unfolding situation of Transnistria (also called Trans-Dniestr or
Transdniestria), a breakaway state located mostly on a strip of land between the
River Dniester and the eastern Moldovan border with Ukraine. It appears that
US-NATO could next create a crisis there in its deadly project to draw Russia
directly into war.

Added to this story is the melting ice in the Arctic Sea and the
opportunity for oil corporations to drill where there was once only ice. The US
military is increasingly active there and Sen. Angus King (I-ME) has become very
involved in promoting the development opportunities from the Arctic zone.
Russia has the largest land border with the Arctic which is likely why the RAND
Corporation has developed a plan to Balkanize the Russian nation thus making it
easier for corporate control of the entire Arctic region.

Our Global Network financial situation is more stable today than ever. I
can only explain it by the increasingly unstable global situation and our base
of supporters feeling like they are getting clear information and determined
action from our network. Unexpected generous donations from the craigslist
Charitable Fund the last two years has given us an additional boost. A recent
funding appeal to our members for travel assistance for our Kyoto meeting was
very successful. Our members appear to like our efforts to connect-the-dots and
do solidarity work in places like Jeju Island, Okinawa, Sicily, and in Kyoto
Prefecture.

The documentary The Ghosts of Jeju (now translated into six languages) has
dramatically helped take our space warfare concerns to many new places.
Filmmaker Regis Tremblay is working on another film about US militarization
across the Asia-Pacific and the GN is doing what we can to support that
project.

In June I traveled to Washington DC to join a Veterans For Peace (VFP)
delegation that met with the Governor and various mayors from Okinawa. I am now
helping to organize a large VFP delegation this fall that will travel to Jeju
Island and Okinawa. VFP leadership has expressed interest in connecting more
directly with our space-related work and has invited me to submit articles for
print in their two most recent national newspapers.

During the past year I was also invited to speak at several national
conferences held in New York, California, New Jersey, and Washington DC. In
each of these events I helped put our space issues directly into the peace and
justice movement’s overall analysis of current events.

Throughout 2014 we’ve also worked closely with the group called
KnowDrones.com that is doing magnificent work concentrating on the drone issue.
Our GN boards approved a $500 donation toward their effort to purchase TV ads in
US communities where drone operations bases are located. The ads called on
drone pilots to stop flying. Recent reports suggest that the military
is having to cut back on its drone missions due to pilot “burnout”. The drone
campaign recently consulted with the GN about how satellites and down-link
stations are used to direct drone attacks, so it is good to see activists
beginning to make these important connections.

During Keep Space for Peace Week in 2014 there were more than 80 local
events held in 10 countries.

During space week our GN board member Tamara
Lorincz (Canada) represented us at a national youth conference on space and
disarmament issues held in Nagpur, India. Board member J. Narayana Rao reported
that the students loved Tamara. Space week will be held in 2015 from October
3-10. Our poster is now being distributed across the US and around the
world.

For the last several years I’ve been organizing a peace walk across Maine
during our annual Keep Space for Peace Week. Two years ago the walk focused on
drones and in 2014 the walk began in a western Maine community where a MD
interceptor deployment site is being considered. This coming October 9-24 the
Maine Walk for Peace will feature the ‘militarization of the seas’ theme and the
Pentagon’s impact on creating climate change. This will allow us to talk about
the US ‘pivot’ of 60% of Pentagon forces (mostly Navy) into the Asia-Pacific
where much environmental damage is being done to ocean life.

Our Space Alert! newspaper remains popular and many local people continue
to place bulk orders for distribution across their communities. Our message
also has been widely broadcasted again this year by regular interviews on
PressTV and Russia Today. My public access TV show, This Issue, now in its 11th
year, is aired on 14 stations across Maine and is sometimes picked up in other
states. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing GN board member Regina
Hagen from Germany when she visited. As our issues get more coverage in the
alternative media, my blog Organizing Notes has seen increased viewing.

During
the past months the top sources of blog visitors have been: US, France, Russia,
Germany, Ukraine, Greece, South Korea, India, United Kingdom, and Japan.

In Bath, Maine in June, 2014 I helped organize a public forum about
conversion of Bath Iron Works that drew 100 citizens. This kind of event was
historic in the ship building community of Bath. I continue to speak and write
about conversion of the military industrial complex at every opportunity. It
seems that an increasing number of people are talking about this across the
country. The issues of jobs, climate change, austerity cuts in social programs,
and endless war all offer the chance to put forward the alternative
transformative vision of conversion to building rail, solar, wind and tidal
power systems so we can deal with the coming reality of climate change.

We continue to owe our web master and board convener, Dave Webb many thanks
for his excellent work and leadership. We thank all of our board members for
their help and advice throughout the year. We thank all of our members who send
donations to keep us going and the very useful information they send along that
I’d otherwise never have the chance to find.

I also owe my partner Mary Beth Sullivan many heartfelt thanks for her
support and loving patience while I work long hours and am often gone on trips.
She helps keep the GN going in many unrecognized ways.

Sunday, August 02, 2015

Sunday Song

Statement from Global Network Kyoto Conference

Final Declaration from the Kyoto
International

Conference on Space and Peace
(August 2, 2015)

The United Nations was
established in 1946 after the Second World War to “Save the succeeding
generations from the scourge of wars, which twice in our life time has brought
untold sorrow to humankind”. The UN visualized establishing a New International
Order. But the US and the erstwhile European colonial countries have joined
together and instead of a New International Order, they have brought a “New
International Disorder”.

The entire
20th Century witnessed wars, aggressions, and assassinations in Asia,
Africa and Latin America. The imperialist countries formed the NATO military
alliance which is being used to indulge in attacks on sovereign nations and
committing war crimes which go unpunished. Even the UN is being side tracked as
NATO expands its mission as the primary resource extraction service for
corporate globalization.

Instead of allowing an
alternative social order to capitalism to be developed the US engaged the USSR
in a nuclear arms race. US has established approximately 1,000 military bases
throughout the world. It was largely responsible for boosting global military
expenditures to more than 1.75 Trillion US Dollars. Along with allies like Saudi
Arabia and other Arab monarchies the US has over the years fostered the growth
of Taliban, Al-Qaida and terrorism throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and
parts of Africa.

Missile defense systems,
key elements in Pentagon first-strike attack planning, have been deployed around
Russia and China. This has helped deal a death blow to hopes for global nuclear
disarmament as both those nations have repeatedly warned that they cannot afford
to reduce their nuclear retaliatory capability at the same time the US deploys
the ‘shield’ on their doorstep.

At
the beginning of the 21st Century the United Nations made another
attempt to herald a “New International Order” by adopting the “Millennium
Declaration” and the Millennium Development Goals. All UN members have accepted
to eschew violence and follow peaceful co-existence ushering disarmament and
development. But again the US and many European partners have created a “New
International Disorder”.

Lies have been spoken in
the governments of US & Britain and also in the UN Security Council about
the non-existent nuclear weapons in Iraq. War in Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq,
attacks on Libya, and drones attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and other nations have
led to the killing of many innocent people.

Having directed a coup
d’état in Ukraine the US has helped create a deadly civil war on Russia’s border
that appears designed to destabilize the government in Moscow.

NATO has been extended
up to the borders of Russia violating post-Cold War promises to the former
Soviet Union that the western military alliance would not move ‘one inch’
eastward. The US-NATO are today sending troops and heavy military hardware to
NATO members Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Georgia all along or near
the Russian border.These provocative
developments could be the trigger for WW III.

US
refusal to negotiate a ban on weapons in space at the UN has left the door open
for continued development of offensive and destabilizing space technologies like
the military space plane and Prompt Global Strike systems.US military satellites offer global
surveillance to the Pentagon and allow for targeting of virtually any place on
Earth.

The recently announced
Obama ‘pivot’ of US forces into the Asia-Pacific is intended to give the
Pentagon the capability to contain and control China.More airfields, barracks, and ports-of-call
are needed for US military operations in the region thus we see expansion of
existing bases, or construction of new bases, in places like South Korea,
Okinawa, Guam, Philippines, Australia and more.We stand in solidarity with those local and national movements that
resist these US base expansions.

Particularly as we meet
in Kyoto, Japan we declare our strong opposition to the US deployment of a
“missile defense” X-Band radar system in the local prefecture that is
provocatively aimed at China.

This Kyoto Conference declares our opposition to the dangerous spread of
global militarization, on behalf of corporate domination, which cannot be
allowed to continue as we see the coming ravages of climate change and growing
global poverty.We must all work to
realize the UN ideal to “save the succeeding generations from the scourge of
wars”. This can only happen with a powerful and unified global movement for
peace, justice and environmental sanity.

We
call for the conversion of the global war machine so that all life on our
spaceship Earth may live and flourish in the years to come.We recognize the need for bold and determined
action now to ensure that another world may in fact be
possible.

We then boarded the high-speed train in Kyoto for the two-hour
ride to Hiroshima.Through the train
window one can see the miles of rice paddies planted in every available space –
including in front yards of people’s homes.

Upon arriving in Hiroshima we checked into our hotel and
took a much-needed rest before taking a walk in the surrounding neighborhoods
looking for a place to eat dinner.By
that time of day the intense heat, worsened by the pavement of the city
streets, had begun to subside just a bit.

This morning I joined a few others who walked over the river
(where Atomic bomb victims threw themselves to try to find relief from the
burning of their bodies 70 years ago following the US bombing) past the
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to the site of today’s plenary session.

If I recall correctly this is my 4th time to
visit Japan during the August 6-9 period.People come from all over the world in large numbers.I first came in 1985 during the height of
the Cold War.

I’ll always remember my first day in 1985 having arrived one
day after world conference activities had begun.As I walked into the meeting hall I heard the hundreds of
international delegates arguing with a Russian man who had just delivered a
speech.The international assembly was
demanding that the Russians get rid of their nuclear weapons.(I have never heard people yelling at any
Americans for similar ‘infractions’.)A
few days later I noticed the Russian man sitting alone in the hotel lobby and I
sat down next to him.He began to cry
as he described the difficulty in his country to move the military leaders
toward considering nuclear disarmament after President Ronald Reagan had
declared that the former Soviet Union was the “epitome of evil in the
world”.I knew that phrase well because
Regan had made that speech in my then hometown of Orlando, Florida at the
Sheraton Hotel.I organized the protest
outside while Reagan was pouring gasoline on the nuclear arms race inside the
hotel.

The Russian peace activist that day gave me several hand
made wooden gifts which I treasure and still have hanging in our house in
Maine.

Words mean something and can have deep and lasting impact
all over our fragile planet.Making
peace begins in our heart and is impacted by what comes out of our mouth.